Day 312: The Germans and Science

This semester I’m taking a course called History of Chemistry purely for fun. It’s a class where each week a different professor —usually a full professor— gives a lecture about their particular branch of chemistry. It’s really interesting, because they all prepare their talks very thoroughly and make very creative presentations with transparencies or PowerPoint (which helps me follow the class despite the German…). It’s an optional course for German students, and I hope I can get it validated as an optional course back in Spain (if not, oh well).

There’s something that strikes me a lot in this country, and this class confirmed it: the way Germans talk about science and scientists. The difference compared to Spain is huge. A large part of the scientists who made history were German (and in chemistry, the proportion is even higher). In class, they talk with complete familiarity about scientists who had always felt distant to me: “When Schrödinger came here to give some lectures…”, “There was a time when Kekulé, while in Dresden…” In Spain, we have two Nobel Prize winners in science: Ramón y Cajal and Severo Ochoa (though the latter doesn’t really count because he won it in the US), while Germany has 71! In fact, this afternoon’s lecture was titled “Wilhelm Ostwald, the only Nobel Prize winner from Saxony”, which would be like talking in Spain about Nobel Prize winners from Extremadura.

Germany has a whole network of institutes spread throughout the country, each one dedicated exclusively to research. Every moderately important city has its own institute specializing in something: Heidelberg has the astronomy institute, Jena the biogeochemistry institute, Garching the quantum optics institute… On top of that, there are the universities and the companies, which also carry out their own projects.
All three are interconnected and work together, so any discovery made by the institutes or the universities is quickly commercialized by companies. This keeps the whole structure funded —almost without relying on public money— and always at the cutting edge, since the market is constantly proposing new challenges.

Perhaps this love of science comes from Germany’s long scientific tradition, or from the kind of education they get at school (always oriented toward the scientific method), or from the endless science-related activities organized by institutions and associations (like the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften —“the night of science”— where anyone can go into a lab, see how scientists work, and even try out an experiment or two). Whatever the reason, Germany has a scent of science about it — something that simply doesn’t exist in Spain, where it’s covered up by the stench of ignorance and indifference.